I suck at color correction. Cameras aren't 10-bit. So let's look bad. Besides built-in Resolve, Premiere and Final Cut, what's your go-to software to color correct?

7:16I'm going to go ahead and read this one. And it's one from Jeffrey. We're just like throwing the ball to each other on this show today. day. So Jeffrey Powers from Madison, Wisconsin s suck. I suck at color correction cameras aren't 10 bit. So let's look bad. Besides built in resolve, Premiere and Final Cut. What's your go to software to color correct? Carl?

7:39So mine is gonna be a little bit of a process we can use what you've mentioned there. So I've had this issue where I've got some Sony camcorders which record h264 and eight bit. And you know because it's just what it was that's fine so what instead of me going into i use premiere to i know sorry i use um final cut pro

7:59to be relatively fast but you can do this in premiere and davinci resolve of course so the way i fix it i kind of did a test i did a two minute video clip test to make sure what i was thinking about would work and it did work and it's my process going forward from now on if i need a color correct 8-bit compressed video hdc64

8:16the first thing i do is i i think in final cut pro it's called optimize So I optimize it, but I optimize it, essentially up-res it to 4K. So I'm taking 1080, 60 or 1080, 50, and I'm up-resing it to 4K at the same frame rate. So that gives me 75% more pixels. But the most important thing I do is I up-res it to ProRes 422.

8:38So it's a humongous file to fix the problem, but it's just a temporary file. You only have to use it for this, and you can throw it away and keep your master, of course. So when you go to, so if you think about just what it's doing in a mathematical sense it's going to create 75% new pixels but these pixels are going to be 10-bit their creation is gonna be 10 bit but they are based off

8:57of 8-bit but they're actually not based off 8-bit pixels they're based off interpolation between two 8-bit pixels so what that means is if the biggest problem you have with color correcting 8-bit is posterization you get a posterized sky you'll just get posterized solid colors this gets rid of that by up-resing to 4k and then you have that 75 pixels are generated at 10 bit from two pixels

9:21that may just be one value apart so you know we're talking 256 colors it may be from you know 128 to 129 but when it goes to 10 bit it can actually do three extra levels in between that and so you actually get a very huge file but when you go to color corrector and you can do an a b comparison and color correcting the original camera file.

9:41When you go to color correct it, with me, it's just really getting the white balance correction. That's all I'm really doing. I'm not doing a crazy lot with shadows and stuff. It's way better when you're doing it with ProRes that's been up-res'd, that's been where 75% of the information is natively, natively 10-bit, because it's interpolated at 10-bit, versus you can always see this with skies and stuff,

10:03the posterization. The posterization is always less. Even though your original stuff is 8-bit, um upraising it and then and we do the sound and audio so an audio whenever we use a plug-in it's going to go up it up raises as high as it can you do the manipulation in the plug-in then it will come back out to your project you know um rate which will be bit rating and um uh sample rate

10:27but the only thing the only gotcha with this is it can slow down your overall production because you have to um approach everything um not only if you've got a mac because the mac has in the more modern max we have a prores codex hardware project codex especially just for the basic 422 flavor um so that's about uprising to uprising to 4k if you're doing 1080 if you're already at um 4k

10:54don't go up to 8k just leave it at 4k it's only because it's going to be fine as far as resolution resolution just go up to a 10-bit format so if you're doing a 4k 8-bit format then up res it to a just just uh well sorry up sample it to 10-bit don't worry about doing the up resing you don't have to in theory yes you can but i wouldn't suggest on that it's only really for 1080 um

11:16but yeah and then go from there then doing manipulation you can do this automatically i believe in final cut pro if you have optimized turned on for when you're importing footage i believe i believe that's the thing that's in there and you can select what codec you're optimizing And so in the background, it will simply just create the HTC, but it will do it at the same